The Rise of Greg

by Chris Rylander

  The campsite was in ruins.

  One tent was completely torched, and the other two were crushed flat. Weapons, sleeping rolls, and supplies were strewn about, as were the scrambling forms of several of our friends. Lake and Tiki were pulling an obviously injured Froggy out of the clearing and into the brush.

  Two separate battles had developed.

  Glam and Stoney were side by side, fighting one Rocnar. Stoney was large—over seven feet tall and several thousand pounds—but the enormous Rocnar dwarfed him as he furiously fended off blows from the monster’s massive hand. Glam pummeled the Rocnar in the knees with her magic boulder fists, but the creature barely seemed to notice.

  The other battle was between the three remaining Sentry and the second Rocnar. This was technically the first time I’d really seen Sentry Elite warriors in action. And, true to their reputation, they were fearsome warriors. The three Sentry danced and weaved around the Rocnar, quicker than my eye could follow, dodging its blows and fire attacks with ease, then darting back in to take quick hacks at its soft underbelly. The creature already had several nasty wounds and looked to be losing steam. The Sentry, though they never stopped moving, looked like they could keep fighting ferociously for hours without needing a break. They definitely seemed to have that Rocnar under control.

  Ari and I ran across the clearing toward Glam, Stoney, and the other Rocnar.

  That battle had taken a turn for the worse. Stoney lay on the ground as the Rocnar repeatedly stomped on him with its knobby, ugly foot. The Rock Troll desperately tried to block the blows with his powerful arms, but the weight of the Rocnar was simply too much.

  Glam had given up pummeling the Rocnar’s knees with her Glam-smash boulders and now had her eyes closed as she worked on another spell. Seconds later, her granite-boulder fists turned black like obsidian and sprouted razor-sharp spikes made from shiny black igneous rock.

  She swung both fists like she was swinging a baseball bat, and the spikes dug into the Rocnar’s right calf.

  It roared in pain.

  Stoney used the distraction to roll away from the beast as it turned its attention to Glam. But one of her spiky boulder fists was lodged in the creature’s leg, completely stuck.

  She couldn’t get away.

  The Rocnar opened its mouth, white flames already igniting somewhere deep inside its throat. Glam’s eyes went wide with fear as she struggled to pull her spiky boulder fist free from the beast’s leg.

  She was a sitting duck.

  Ari and I were still too far away to help.

  I debated summoning a wind spell to knock the beast over, but with Glam still attached to it, that might only make things worse.

  But it was too late either way.

  As Glam finally pulled herself free and stumbled backward, the blue-and-white flames were already streaming down toward her.

  The last thing I heard was a horrible scream before the flames engulfed her.

  CHAPTER 15

  My First Hole in One

  I stumbled and then nearly fell from the horror and shock of seeing my friend consumed by white fire.

  But Ari grabbed my arm and pulled me along, forcing me to keep going.

  “Greg, look!” she yelled. “She’s okay!”

  Stoney had thrust himself between Glam and the Rocnar’s flames at the very last second. His massive form huddled over Glam, shielding her from the fire as it spewed and rolled across his craggy back.

  A rumble of pain escaped his mouth.

  Glam recovered from her fall and scrambled away, rolling in the dirt to put out her flaming clothes.

  The Rocnar finally ran out of energy and the fire ceased, but Stoney was on his knees, holding his face as smoke drifted between his fingers and up into the soft blue morning sky visible between the tall trees.

  Then Ari and I were upon the Rocnar, slashing and hacking at the beast wherever we could. But my small dagger, Blackout, as sharp as it was, could not penetrate the Rocnar’s tough, wart-ridden hide. Even Ari’s battle-ax bounced off its skin like it was made of plastic.

  “The belly!” I shouted, remembering the Sentry warriors’ strategy for battling the other Rocnar. “Go for the belly!”

  Ari nodded and lunged with her ax. But the Rocnar, aware of its own soft spot, quickly deflected the blow with its elbow. Then it backhanded Ari, and she went sprawling in a backward somersault across the forest floor.

  The Rocnar turned its beady, emotionless black eyes toward me and roared.

  The inside of its mouth was covered in gore and rotting flesh from an untold number of unfortunate prey. But it was also red and soft and not at all like the rough terrain of its exterior skin.

  I rolled away as the beast attempted to grab me.

  Ari and Glam were both back, lunging for the monster’s belly with their weapons. But they weren’t fast enough. It was easily able to dodge or deflect all of the blows.

  The Rocnar was massive but didn’t stand up straight. It almost had a hunched back as it sat on its haunches, as if in a perpetual squat. Though a funny posture, it provided a lot of natural cover for its obviously vulnerable soft belly.

  I glanced across the clearing at the Sentry warriors battling the other Rocnar.

  They were still engaged, dancing and twirling and making little nicks and slashes here and there at the creature’s soft spot. They were going to win, but it would take a while to actually fell the beast. It was more a war of attrition than brute strength. It seemed like a solid strategy against a Rocnar. The problem was that Glam, Ari, and I weren’t skilled enough, or fast enough, to pull it off the way the Sentry Elite special forces soldiers could.

  We needed a different plan of attack.

  As Ari and Glam dove out of the way of yet another burst of flame from the Rocnar, I rolled to my left and behind the beast as it spewed fire in a curvy path trying to catch Glam as she scrambled away.

  I got a good look at the monster’s lumpy, ugly head, surprised to see it had many of the same features as a Human head. Despite some obvious differences, it still had nostrils (four gaping nostrils are still nostrils), a mouth (large and filled with teeth), and two ears (which were nothing more than two holes in the sides of its head).

  Inspiration struck.

  “Ari and Glam!” I yelled, as the beast stopped breathing fire to reset. “Stay back, stay in front of it, and be ready!”

  “For what?” they shouted in unison.

  “You’ll know,” I said, and then ran toward the monster before it had a chance to turn around.

  I got to its rear right flank and leaped into the air. With a little assist from my Dwarven wind spell, I landed squarely on its right shoulder blade area. The Rocnar’s warts and slimy pustules, as disgusting as they were, actually made for pretty stable hand- and footholds.

  I scrambled up the side of the monster as it flung its arm back, trying to swat me off.

  Once I got onto its right shoulder, I reached an arm toward the side of its head to get a good grip, then pulled Blackout free from my belt with my other hand. I quickly focused on another spell I had done a few days before inside the belly of a Kraken.

  Blackout’s shiny blade began to glow red-hot.

  I turned my attention to the Rocnar’s exposed earhole and lunged at it with the blade.

  But just before I got there, its hand finally found me, and easily ripped me from its shoulder. As it pulled me toward its face, presumably to eat me, I knew I only had one last chance before I’d be Rocnar chow.

  I reared back and threw the dagger toward the earhole, which was no more than seven inches across, and also a moving target. I tried to use magic to guide the blade, and I have no idea if that’s what did it, or if it really had just been an impossibly accurate throw. But either way, my knife hit its intended target.

  The searing-hot blade plunged into the
Rocnar’s right earhole.

  The beast howled in pain as it dropped me.

  “Now!” I screamed as I fell.

  It all happened so fast that I had no idea if Ari had heard me or simply knew what to do by instinct when the moment arrived. I watched from the ground as she hurled her battle-ax up toward the creature’s face as it roared in pain.

  The ax flew into the Rocnar’s mouth, and the beast flinched, convulsing suddenly as it gagged. A squeal escaped from the creature’s throat as it teetered backward.

  The massive Rocnar fell over, landing with a heavy THUMP. A loud, thick gurgle of blood erupted from its mouth as it convulsed a final time and died.

  I sat up, breathing hard, unable to fully believe what had just happened.

  I looked over, expecting to see Glam and Ari high-fiving in celebration or rushing over to high-five me. Or maybe we’d all high-five one another awkwardly. But there was no high-fiving or celebration of any kind.

  Instead, they were hunched over Stoney, who was still kneeling and holding a hand to his face.

  I rushed over as he finally got back to his feet, his skin singed.

  He turned to look at me, but his eyes were gone. Instead there were two crusted and blackened spaces. Two tendrils of gray smoke drifted up from his face, toward the sky like evaporating tears.

  “GREGGDROULE?” he said. “OBLIVION.”

  “Greg, I think he’s been blinded,” Ari said.

  CHAPTER 16

  Rock Troll Jokes Are About as Unfunny as a Punch to the Eye

  Stoney was indeed blind.

  And it wasn’t one of those temporary things where his eyesight would return after a few hours or days or weeks. No, his eyeballs had basically been incinerated, and his eyelids fused shut by the heat. Stoney would be blind forever.

  Dwarven magic was powerful, but as far as anybody knew or had ever heard or read about in the texts, there was no spell that could re-create lost eyes or resurrect the dead, etc. Dwarven magic was still rooted in nature, and fixing such severe injuries was, well, unnatural.

  But Stoney was actually taking it pretty well. He didn’t even seem distraught and was already making jokes about it. Like when he held up one of the Rocnar’s long, severed fingers by the knuckle and tapped it on the ground in front of him a few times and said, “AMBULATORY ASSISTANCE CANE?”

  “Gross, Stoney,” Ari said, gagging, even as Lake and Tiki howled with laughter behind her. “You can’t use that thing’s finger as a walking stick!”

  Glam was definitely taking Stoney’s injury the hardest. She had apologized to him (and thanked him) so many times in the hour after the battle that we’d basically had to restrain her to keep her from going near him. We all knew he’d do it the same way all over again if he had to.

  Sadly, though, Stoney wasn’t the only casualty of the battle.

  Sentry Two and Sentry Three had both died during the initial Rocnar ambush. But it was weird; the other Sentry didn’t seem to care. They didn’t express sadness or regret for being unable to save them, and in fact didn’t even mourn their fallen comrades at all. They just got to work butchering the two Rocnar carcasses for meat and salvaging what was left of our tents and supplies.

  “Don’t you even care?” Ari asked at one point. “They were your teammates, your fellow warriors, your—your . . . friends!”

  “Incorrect,” Sentry One replied, emotionless. “None of us are friends. The Sentry don’t have friends.”

  “At least take some time to mourn the loss of your squad members,” I suggested.

  “Negative,” Sentry Five scoffed. “Death is a part of our job. We do not mourn our losses. That only wastes time and distracts from objectives. Once you join the Sentry, you cease to be an individual whose death can be mourned. We are all small parts of a larger whole and shall be treated as nothing more.”

  “It’s part of the Sentry code,” Sentry One added. “‘We serve, we fight, we protect, we uphold our mission, and die for it willingly if the gods make it so.’ There is nothing to do now but reassess how best to proceed in an efficient manner, having lost 40 percent of our forces.”

  Ari and I exchanged a look and finally gave up.

  After all, they did make a valid point: the fate of the world possibly rested on the success of our mission, and so it was largely irresponsible to waste time mourning the loss of two, when our failure would mean the loss of millions, or perhaps even billions.

  Thankfully the only other casualty (aside from minor bumps and bruises) was Froggy, who had suffered a badly sprained ankle. But Tiki was already busy working on a spell to reduce the swelling and pain in his leg.

  Tiki Woodjaw had always had the Ability. But she never received any training until she moved with us to the Chicago Underground. Once there, she began magic training with Fenmir Mystmossman while I was a prisoner in Edwin’s base at Alcatraz. And it turned out that Tiki had two talents:

  Vulgar and creative cursing

  Learning and casting healing spells

  While her spells couldn’t always instantly fix an injury, they did go a long way to reducing the pain and speeding up the recovery process.

  All in all, we considered ourselves very lucky as a group, which was a very un-Dwarf-like feeling.

  A few hours after the Battle of Rocnar Clearing, we’d salvaged what we could of the tents, butchered and packaged as much of the Rocnar meat as we could carry,* and carved Stoney a walking stick.

  We gathered up our things, ready to embark again on our quest.

  “Okay, which way from here, Stoney?” I asked.

  Then we all went still. One by one, our heads turned slowly toward the Rock Troll. We stared at the charred remains of his eyes in silent realization.

  “STONEY’S CURRENT BEARING?” he asked. “STONEY DISORIENTED.”

  “Um . . .” I said.

  “We’re really kunked now,” Tiki said. “Our navigator can’t even plorping see where he’s going!”

  The Sentry gasped at Tiki’s infamously obscure and obscenely vulgar Separate Earth curse words. But she was right: What were we going to do now? Stoney was our only guide to the amulet.

  “Regular compasses don’t work in this forest, Stoney,” Ari said quietly. “None of us can tell you what direction we’re facing.”

  Then Stoney began making a gravelly, lurching noise, almost like he was about to barf. But I recognized what it really was right away: Rock Troll laughter. Stoney was giggling, almost in stitches.

  “HOAX,” he said. “STONEY UTILIZE PAGEANT WITTICISM. COMEDIC SUBTERFUGE. MACHINATE PSEUDO-APPREHENSION. CONSTRUCT JOVIAL SCENARIO. STONEY DISCERN APPROPRIATE BEARING. ADVANCE FORTHWITH.”

  The huge Rock Troll pointed a finger and then began walking in that direction, tapping his massive walking stick on the ground in front of him to help detect obstacles.

  Nobody laughed at Stoney’s practical joke as we followed.

  But I was pretty sure I heard the sound of nine collective sighs of relief as we trekked deeper into the Hidden Forest.

  CHAPTER 17

  The Long-Lost Estoc of Galdadroona from the Legend of Sir Darormir Beardsbane

  If our battle with the Rocnars taught me anything, it was that I needed a new weapon.

  More and more, throwing away the Bloodletter (which was rumored to be the most powerful Dwarven weapon ever created) was proving to have been a colossal mistake. If he were here, he’d definitely agree: Of course it was a mistake, Greggdroule! It’s that moment in every story when the reader is slapping their palm to their forehead, completely beside themselves at the apparent idiocy of the hero.

  But that was the thing: I was not a hero.

  And the ax had been turning me into something I wasn’t. Someone I liked less and less the more I was around it. Violent. Selfish. Brash.

  Just the same, I could
n’t continue this clearly dangerous journey without a weapon larger and more intimidating than a small dagger.

  Which was why it was incredibly fortuitous (and a little suspicious) that we came across a sword in a stone the following morning.

  Yes, a real sword in a stone. (I know, I’m rolling my eyes, too.)

  We found it probably around ten miles from the campsite the Rocnars had attacked the day before.

  Glam was the first to spot the hilt sticking up from a large boulder.

  Aside from being lodged in a solid rock, the sword didn’t look particularly special. The hilt bore no artisanal flourishes or inlaid gemstones. It wasn’t made of gold or adorned with intricate carvings. It was just a steel hilt with a straight cross guard, and a spherical pommel roughly the size of a golf ball. Any leather, wire, or wood that might have once been wrapped around the hilt to protect the wielder’s hand had long since been eaten away by the elements. The blade, too, appeared rather ordinary, aside from the fact that the seven or eight exposed inches were shiny and polished as if the sword had been lodged there for just a few hours, rather than the far more likely decades, centuries, or even millennia.

  “A sword in a stone?” I finally said. “Really? I mean, come on . . .”

  It was no secret that I didn’t like fantasy movies or books, even before I’d found out I was a Dwarf and that many of them were actually based on real historical events. None of my friends liked fantasy movies or books either, but for them it had more to do with how many things these works of “fiction,” like The Hobbit, got wrong, rather than a distaste for the tropes. You know, stuff like enchanted weapons with names, special amulets with magical powers, prophecies, wizards, and bizarre creatures like talking trees and Rocnars.

  And now here was a literal sword in a stone, perhaps one of the most famous fantasy tropes of all time.

  “I think it’s cool,” Glam said. “It probably has, like, sick powers and stuff.”